Service desk Chatbot Archives - BotCore

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection

Rakesh Reddy — Mon, 25 May 2020 05:45:00 +0000

Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using Call Deflection & AI

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the unique challenges it has posed, has engulfed customers in a wave of fear and uncertainty and put organizations in a jiffy.

There has been a sharp spike in the volume of calls as anxious customers seek support on a variety of issues.

A majority of customers consider call support as a flexible channel of communication as it allows them to verbally explain and negotiate with the agents. Moreover, customers prefer calling for urgent matters, including cancelled flights and refunds, health insurance coverage, timings of convenience stories, appointments for COVID-19 tests, loan approvals, and much more.

Particularly, contact centers in industries like banking, airlines, retail, and healthcare have been experiencing a nightmare with the unprecedented surge in call volumes.

Organizations are facing a myriad of challenges, such as -

Contact centers are ill-equipped to deal with the huge increase in the volume of incoming customer calls and chats, which has burdened their systems, their agents, and their ability to respond and deflect calls from the queues.
The Washington State Department of Health’s coronavirus hotline experienced an average wait-time of 10 minutes with calls dropping 20 minutes after the customers were put on-hold;

Due to the inherent tendency to use call support in times of crises, customers are abandoning self-service channels and instead directly calling and requesting agent support.
A lot of questions and requests are repetitive and basic
Voice-based channels are not only expensive but also difficult to scale
There has been a shortage of staff as support agents fall sick and are unable to continue work.
Many US airlines have requested their customers who do not have flights within the next 72 hours to wait until closer to their trip before calling up the contact center;
Adding more agents is not only expensive; but also not feasible at a short notice.

Reducing Call Volume With Call Deflection and AI-Enabled Virtual Assistance

To deal with the above issues and reduce contact center call volume, organizations can use a call deflection approach driven by AI chatbots. Call deflection involves diverting incoming customer calls to alternate means of answering questions like self-service and digital channels e.g. chatbots.

AI Chatbots can handle an unlimited number of requests at the same time, provide instant support, and decrease costs for the organization as lesser employees are needed to handle customer queries. Moreover, they can answer routine customer questions 24×7, without the need for human support.

A combination of call-deflection and AI-enabled virtual assistance can improve the productivity of contact center agents, while simultaneously managing the surge in the volume of calls.

Irrespective of whether your IVR is based on legacy technology or deployed on the cloud, it is possible to shift the incoming call traffic to a text-based channel.

When the customer is ready to engage via text, the virtual assistant can converse with the client using natural language processing to handle simple requests, such as leading the customers to the required information. Or it can enable them to self-transact. Or it can be an extensive bot that offers complex capabilities, like drawing up the required background information to provide personalized solutions to customer queries.

The purpose of deflecting incoming calls is that a bot can handle customer requests that are basic and repetitive, and thereby it eliminates the need for agent involvement. The request will be transferred to an agent only when a customer specifically requests the transfer or the bot determines the conversation is too complex for it to handle.

Learn More:

The 2 Types of Call Deflection

Proactive and reactive call deflection are the two ways of diverting calls to text-based channels –

Proactive call deflection

Proactive call deflection is an approach in which measures are taken to prevent customers from calling to the contact centres in the first place and instead drive them to proactively use self-service digital channels. This involves:

Setting expectations and keeping customers informed about service hours, availability of certain services and the possible alternatives.
Driving awareness about self-service messaging channels and creating opportunities for customers to adopt them.

Proactive deflection, when supplemented with automation, allows customers to engage in a two-way interaction with a chatbot to resolve issues without waiting for agents. Thus, customers can operate in a self-serve mode for routine queries, and be directed to human agents only for more complex ones.

Reactive call deflection

A reactive approach to call deflection starts once customers call the contact center. On calling the contact center, the customers should be allowed to select the channel of their choice.

Customers may then opt to resolve their issue in a self-serve mode, with the help of AI-enabled chatbots enabled in messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp etc.

An alternate way of doing this is using Conversation IVR systems which leverage Natural Language Processing to interact with customers via voice and resolve their queries.

Steps involved in Reactive Call Deflection Supported by AI chatbots

Deflection – Customers call the contact center. When faced with long queues, they opt to divert their queries to a virtual assistant channel. Once the call ends, customers get a link to open a virtual agent and continue their conversation.
Automation – The customer opens the chatbot on his/her device. The virtual assistant can answer FAQs or carry out simple tasks. If faced with a more complex query, the bot captures customer information and/or schedules call-backs before forwarding the request to a human agent or offline processing.
Integration – The virtual agent should integrate with any existing live chat platform to allow escalation to a human agent, when the VA can’t handle the request.

Benefits of Call Deflection supported by AI

A study by Gartner indicates that, “As much as 40% of today’s live volume could be resolved in self-service channels.” Here are some benefits of using call deflection supported by AI.

Improved agent productivity
A self-service fix costs 80-100 times less than a live interaction
Chatbots can provide instant assistance to customers even beyond the working hours
They can handle unlimited requests at the same time
A chatbot can work in close tandem with live agents to handle complex queries;
Call deflection and AI reduce the incoming call traffic, leading to shorter wait-times. This avoids customer frustration;
Improved CSAT and customer experience at lowered costs

Get Started

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented increase in the number of customer calls to contact centers. To ease the burden off support agents, organizations can implement a combination of call deflection (proactive or reactive) and AI-enabled chatbots.

Such automation enables customers to self-serve and provides them with a 24X7 interactive experience at significantly lower costs. It also allows the support staff to focus on the complex queries, leaving the chatbots to handle routine asks.

We, at Acuvate Software, are helping clients deliver superior customer experiences through our intuitive, no-code bot-builder platform called BotCore.

BotCore presents several benefits –

The intuitive, no-code interface allows the quick implementation of AI chatbots
It can seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems and AI services
It also allows the connection of existing bots across different departments
It is deployable on both on-site and cloud environments
Chatbots can be designed to simulate highly complex conversations

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

The post Manage High Call Volume During COVID-19 Using AI & Call Deflection appeared first on BotCore.

How chatbots help you reduce customer service costs

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 13:27:00 +0000

How Chatbots Help You Reduce Customer Service Costs

As businesses today incorporate AI and automation technology into their customer service workflows and day to day business in general, chatbots are a high-value addition to the mix. However, what business stakeholders really want to know are the different ways a chatbot implementation can reduce customer service costs and expenses. And let’s face it, money is one of the most crucial factors that drive business decisions. Today, we explore how chatbots can help considerably cut down on customer service costs.

chatbots – how can they help you?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence tool that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service, information acquisition and getting tasks done.

Chatbots are primarily of two kinds – scripted bots and ai bots. while scripted bots as the name suggests, follow a predefined stream of conversation, ai bots or intelligent bots use ai and natural language processing (nlp) algorithms to understand the ‘intent’ behind a question and respond back with the most appropriate answer possible.

Large and medium sized companies today have a customer base which is diverse, fragmented and presented all over the globe. providing excellent customer service is imperative for companies to gain a competitive edge, increase customer retention and loyalty.

With companies having established an air of accessibility with the help of social media, email, and instant messaging services, customers now expect a quick response at all hours of the day. but these communication channels do not come cheap. even back in 2017, forbes had assessed that customer service was a $350 billion industry. factor in the number of new companies and businesses that have permeated the market in the past two years, and you can imagine what that number must be today. with organizations working towards having leaner companies and cutting down costs, automated tools that can provide similar, if not greater customer service, that human resources could, have become all the rage. one such automated solution is the use of chatbots.

According to gartner ,inc, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (vca) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020. this number has gone up drastically from less than 2 percent in 2017! according to gene alvarez, managing vice president at gartner, more than half of the global organizations have already invested in automated solutions for customer service, as they realize the advantages of automated self-service, together with the ability to escalate to a human agent in case of complex situations. gartner research also reports that organizations report a reduction of up to 70 percent in call, chat and/or email inquiries after implementing an automated solution such as a chatbot.

According to the aspect consumer experience index, 70 percent of millennials report positive experiences with chatbots, and many prefer chatbots for the convenience and immediate gratification. along with increased customer satisfaction, a 33 percent saving per voice engagement has also been noted.

But, do chatbots produce considerable and consistent savings?

yes, they do. here’s how.

chatbots – effective money savers

Some of the most prominent ‘money saver’ abilities that chatbots possess, are:

24/7 presence

Let’s imagine a scenario where you are using a video production tool for a project due tomorrow. after hitting ‘save & close’, you are suddenly unsure as to where the video has been saved. in spite of frantically trying to locate it, you are unsuccessful in doing so. panic hits and you immediately search for the tool’s customer service details. you don’t really care that it is 2 in the middle of the night; you need help, and you need it now.

In such a scenario, a perceptive company would ensure that 24/7 customer support is available for just these type of cases. however, if a company in an attempt to cut down costs, has done away with round-the-clock support, well, they better be ready for the customer’s wrath the next morning. the truth is, customers today pay for more than just the product. they pay for good service too. hence, it is crucial that companies provide it. so what can a company do to provide good customer service while cutting down on costs? use a chatbot.

The greatest thing about chatbots is, they don’t charge by the hour. whether you have implemented a chatbot for 9 hours in a day or 24, it costs the same. hence using chatbots to handle after-hour queries, is practical. this way, customers trying to establish contact do not feel deprived either. the company too is happy as no additional resources need to be hired.

reduced training expenses

An area of concern for most companies is the constant training of customer care agents. as newer products are added to the company’s portfolio, older processes reformed and new resources hired, training and updating becomes imperative. but this a cost that can quickly escalate and get out of hand. chatbots on the other hand are capable of constant and automated refinement. even in case of newer data, an update can be made to the centralized system and revision cascades to the overall chatbot operation. chatbots are actually in constant improvement mode as they get trained through user queries and form patterns to understand what the best response to respective questions might be.

helping increase company revenue

Chatbots are not just good at ‘saving’ the company’s money, but are also capable of ‘increasing’ revenue. how is this done, you ask? well, most companies today use chatbots for more than just user help. chatbots learn from past conversations from users and provide proactive and personalized product/service recommendations to customers. this personalization in customer experience helps drive sales and revenue.

optimizing workforce costs

Let’s face it, competent labour does not come cheap. while staffing still remains one of the biggest expenses globally, it is also the hardest to cut down. especially with respect to customer care, companies that have tried to have fewer resources man the field, have faced not just customer wrath, but also employee burnout. additionally, telephonic customer service has an added disadvantage; fewer resources mean a longer wait time for the customers, obviously meaning a heftier phone bill. so, essentially companies can end up spending more on phone bills than saving on staffing. but, imagine if a chatbot was to be used as a first line of service? while a human chat agent can effectively chat with about three customers at onc, efficient chatbots can handle an unlimited number of interactions simultaneously. this means that a chatbot could be employed to handle as many customer concerns as possible, transferring the service process to a human agent in case of very complex queries.

in conclusion

Essentially, chatbots can help organizations provide better customer care with fewer resources. although we cannot completely eliminate the human touch from customer service, chatbots can be used to cut down on human intervention as much as possible. this can be achieved by using chatbots to manage a larger volume of customer needs while reserving only the most complicated issues for human agents. this technique is capable of drastically cutting down on customer service costs. in fact, cnbc reports that chatbots are expected to cut down on business costs by as much as $8 billion by the year 2022. now that is a number worth taking seriously.

If you’d like to learn more about enterprise chatbots please feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants for a quick consultation!

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7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Abhishek Shanbhag — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:09:43 +0000

7 Actionable Tips To Reduce Contact Center Call Volume

Providing a great customer experience while reducing call volume and costs is the ultimate goal of any contact center. Over the years, contact centers have invested in various types of customer-facing technologies – right from IVR, CTI, CRM, ACD to AI. But in spite of deploying these technologies, most organizations are not able to improve operational efficiencies, enhance CX or maximize their ROI.

Most organizations today believe that technology alone is the solution to reduce costs and by focusing solely on implementing the technology they allow CX and their core operations to take a hit.

But there are ways in which the number of calls that a contact center receives can be reduced while ensuring good customer experience and better business growth. In the following section, we discuss the top 5 tips to reduce call volumes in your contact center.

7 tips to reduce contact center volume

map the customer journey

The first step in cutting down inbound call volume is to determine why customers are calling the contact center in the first place. This includes recognizing the most common issues that customers are facing with respect to a product, process or service. Often, it is a bunch of similar reasons that tend to lead to the majority of inbound calls.

Once the most common reasons behind inbound calls are established, we can use customer journey analytics to map the customer service journey. Analytical data gives us an insight into the effectiveness of the service provided by the agents in the contact center as well as recognize the pain points faced by the customer.

Using customer journey analytics helps assess the information that is readily available to customers, determine the ease with which customers can reach out to the contact center when required and establish the top reasons why customers call-in. Armed with this information, companies can take the primary steps required to reduce inbound call volume.

measure customer effort score (CES)

Customer Effort Score refers to the ease of customer interaction and getting a resolution for a request. High-effort experiences include switching between channels, repeat interaction, transfers, etc. Tracking CES helps you reduce call volume and costs whilst improving customer experience. According to Gartner, low-effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls. Gartner also recommends asking this single question to measure CES.

focus on multiple channels and provide self-service options

Use different channels for communication and promote these channels evenly. Assign KPIs for each channel. Allow customers to choose their options. Enable smart self-service options across web, mobile, and telephone. Some self-service best practices include:

Highly visible and updated FAQs
Customized CRM portals
Strong and NLP enabled knowledge base solution
Self-help links integrated into web pages that lead to the respective help document(s).
Online community discussion portals

A more modern and efficient self-service option through which customers can look for answers is via Chatbots and conversational IVR systems. Chatbots today can be deployed from handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets as well as from the desktop. They are increasingly being integrated in social media applications such as Facebook, as well. We will learn about chatbots in detail in the next section.

using AI chatbots

Chatbot adoption in contact centers has grown exponentially in the past couple of years, across industries. According to Gartner, 25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate bot technology across their engagement channels by 2020; this statistic used to be less than two percent in 2017.

Chatbots today are powered by conversational AI, NLP, and machine learning, and offer the same conversational experience as communicating with a human agent. In contact centers, they are deployed as the first line of support in order to handle tier-1 interactions. The 24/7 availability and an easy-to-use conversational interface of chatbots make them an efficient self-service option for customers. Chatbots reduce the number of calls that human executives have to handle, without compromising on the customer experience.

Learn more: 10 Powerful Benefits of Chatbots in Customer Service

chatbot agent handoff

Although chatbots are great at handling customer interactions by simulating human-like conversations, a common misconception that customer service leaders may have is that a chatbot alone is sufficient to handle customer service. But the truth is that there may be scenarios where the customer interaction needs to be handed off to a human agent.

In such a scenario, the chatbot must be able to identify the need for human intervention and seamlessly transition the interaction to the appropriate agent. In this way, the inbound call volume can be cut down by fulfilling basic, preliminary tasks such as aggregating user information, and recording customer concerns with the help of a chatbot. Only those tasks that absolutely need human intervention can be routed to the human agents.

Learn more: Human Hand-off in Service Desk Bots

conversational IVR

Chatbot technology in call centers is also intended to replace traditional IVR systems that tend to be a major pain point for customers looking for quick and effective issue resolution. Unlike traditional IVR systems, conversational IVR uses NLP and Machine Learning to understand the content of customers’ speech and enables dynamic and hassle-free experiences. Customers no longer have to navigate through the complex navigation menu of a traditional IVR.

ensure first call resolution ( fcr)

A major factor that contributes to increased inbound call volume in contact centers is that most issues are not resolved in the first call, requiring multiple calls to ensure resolution. This leads to calls adding-up while also being detrimental to customer satisfaction.

Essentially, customer satisfaction is directly related to the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate of the contact center. One of the ways to ensure FCR is to frequently measure CSAT with the aim to improve it.

optimize in order to reduce repeat calls

When contact centers receive calls regarding issues with certain ineffective customer-oriented processes, they must have a resource in the backend team to modify or improve these processes and related self-help pages accordingly. By improving pages and processes based on support calls, contact centers can reduce the occurrence of repeat calls for the same issues in the future.

Reducing call volume is key to reduce business costs in any contact center. And this involves streamlining and automation of processes and intelligent orchestration of work.

If you want to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our customer experience and AI experts for a personalized consultation.

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Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Jagan Jami — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 10:09:00 +0000

Envisioning The Work-Life Of An Employee In A Chatbot-Driven Enterprise

Meet Nathan. He has recently joined ABC Corp. as a Marketing Manager. The new job means a new city and the tension associated with relocation. But one thing that Nathan is thankful for is that the hiring and on-boarding process was seamless and did not require him to visit their office again and again. But how was this achieved? Well, luckily for Nathan, ABC Corp. happens to be one of the forward-thinking organizations that uses chatbots for all their HR, ITSM, and Business Intelligence related tasks.

what is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Chatbots are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner and are used for various practical enterprise use cases including customer service, IT helpdesk, HR or information acquisition (Business Intelligence).

ABC Corp uses BotCore’s AI chatbot which enables organizations to build and deploy customized AI chatbots. So, let us see how Nathan’s life at ABC Corp. has been impacted by chatbots.

chatbots – making nathan’s life easier

Nathan has joined as a Marketing Manager. A typical day in the life of someone in this role entails multiple team meetings, client interactions and brainstorming sessions that require them to access records and data insights on the go. Also, since marketing managers almost always have days that are jam-packed, having someone take care of handling internal processes such as applying for leave, giving appraisals, searching for reports and information and keeping them abreast of upcoming meetings etc. would be a boon. Someone like a personal assistant; BUT, not everyone can have an assistant tracking these details. It is just not a feasible option. However, everyone can seek help from a virtual assistant. In order to see how chatbots are helping Nathan handle daily life at ABC Corp., let us look at some scenarios.

Recruitment

When Nathan applied for the position at ABC Corp., he was immediately sent a text message by Allie, ABC’s recruitment bot.

Allie: Hello Nathan. I am Allie from ABC Corp. I am reaching out to you in response to your application for the position of Marketing Manager.

Allie: We see that your skill set matches that which is required for the role. Could I go ahead and set up an interview for you with our GM-Marketing?

Nathan: Thanks, Allie Sure!

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Would the 1st July 2019, 12 PM work for you?

Nathan: Umm…will I be required to come to your HQ location?

Allie: That will not be necessary. I see that you are based in a different city, hence we could have the interview via Skype. Is that okay?

Nathan: That would be perfect. Thank you!

Allie: You are welcome. Please add ABCCorp as a contact on Skype. I have sent you a calendar invite for the interview. Kindly acknowledge the same.

Nathan: Sure.

Allie: Thank you Nathan. Have a great day ahead. And good luck for the interview!

Nathan was extremely pleased with how efficient Allie was in reaching out to him quickly, understanding his location criteria and setting up an interview accordingly. In a recent survey by Allegis it was noted that 58% of candidates were comfortable interacting with AI and recruitment chatbots in the early stages of the application process. In fact, about 66% of candidates were comfortable with AI and chatbots taking care of interview scheduling and peripheral activity.

Essentially, a recruitment chatbot can collect information from candidates such as their resume and contact information, help set up an interview with a human stakeholder based on his/her calendar, collect screening details such as experience and skills and answer the candidate’s basic questions about the job.

Learn more: How Chatbots Can Simplify the Recruitment Process

HR Onboarding

Once Nathan cleared the interview and was offered the job, he was reached out by Allie once again.

Allie: Hello Nathan. This is Allie. Congratulations on the offer, Welcome to ABC Corp!

Nathan: Hi Allie. Thank you very much.

Allie: Before we start the onboarding formalities, do you have any questions I can help you with?

Nathan: As a matter of fact, yes. Could you please send me any company related information I should be well-versed in before getting started?

Allie: Absolutely! Below is a company overview video to get you started with!

Allie: You can also refer this intranet page for more information [Read Now]

Nathan: Great! Thanks Allie. Could you also send across the leave policy and the list of holidays for this year?

Allie: Sure. Here are the leave policy and the holiday calendar. [Check Now]

Now, please note that as part of the onboarding process, you are required to send across copies of the following documents to hr@abccorp.com:

Personal Identification Details – any authority attested identification card would do

Last 3 payslips from your previous employer

Bank account details

Nathan: Sure, I will send them across.

Allie: Okay. Also sending across the NDA. Please sign the same and send it across.

Nathan: Okay.

Allie: Great! Thank you Nathan..

Nathan: I’d like to raise an IT request for requesting a new laptop

Allie: Sure, your request is recorded. An IT agent will get in touch with you soon!

Nathan: That’s great, Thanks Allie!

Learn More: How Chatbots are Revolutionizing The HR Department

IT Helpdesk

Nathan has started his first day at ABC Corp. and has met his team. He has been given access to the company’s marketing dashboard but is unable to sign in. He remembers that ABC Corp. uses an IT helpdesk bot that can be accessed using the internal messaging tool. He decides to seek help.

Nathan: Hi.

IT Bot: Hello Nathan. Welcome to ABC Corp. How can I help you?

Nathan: Well, I am unable to sign in to the marketing dashboard.

IT Bot: Have you been granted access?

Nathan: Yes. I was sent an email earlier that I can now access the dashboard to see project-specific details. But my sign-in credentials do not work.

IT Bot: Sorry about that. Let me check.

Nathan: Sure.

IT Bot: Looks like there was a technical problem with credential generation. I have sent across a password reset link to your email ID. Kindly use it to sign in with the new password.

Nathan: Okay. Thank you.

IT Bot: My pleasure. Is there anything else I may assist you with?

Nathan: No.

IT Bot: Okay! Have a nice day Nathan.

Nathan uses the password reset link to quickly sign-in to the dashboard. He is happy that instead of having to waste time locating and asking the right people for the fix, he was able to reach out to the IT helpdesk bot in no time.

business intelligence

It has now been a couple of weeks since Nathan joined ABC Corp. Today he is scheduled to meet with the head of Alpha Foods, a long-standing customer of the company. One of the issues that Alpha Foods is facing is a steep decline in sales. Nathan has been asked by his manager to focus on the issue in order to come up with a fix. Before he walks into the meeting, Nathan wants to be abreast of the company’s revenue and sales data. He decides to use Mylo, ABC Corp.’s Business Intelligence bot.

Nathan: Hi Mylo.

Mylo: Hello Nathan. How can I help you today?

Nathan: I have a meeting with Alpha Foods. Can I see their annual revenue details for last year?

Mylo: Sure. Alpha Foods’ annual revenue for 2017-2018 is 90 Billion.

Nathan: Okay, can you break that down by region?

Mylo: USA – 32B, Asia Pacific region – 35.7B, Europe – 22.3B.

Nathan: Okay, can I see a graphical representation of their sales in the Asia Pacific region?

Mylo: Yes.

Nathan: Well, that doesn’t look good. What about their sales in Europe and USA?

Mylo: They seem to be doing pretty well there. Sales in Europe have seen an improvement of 6% on average annually. Sales in the USA are on the uprise too – at an average annual rate of 2%.

Nathan: Map sales numbers for Asia Pacific with their trade promotional campaigns from the last 5 years.

Mylo: There are no trade promotions from Alpha in Asia Pacific between the years 2013 – 2018.

Nathan: That explains it. This is enough insight for now. Can you mail these figures to me as well?

Mylo: Sure. The details have been sent to your email.

Nathan has understood that Alpha Foods is facing an issue specifically in the Asia Pacific region as they are facing a hard time attracting customers to their products. Nathan uses the data insights provided by Mylo to suggest a new trade promotional campaign to boost sales for Alpha in the Asia Pacific region.

Learn More: Why Business Intelligence Needs Chatbots to Boost User Adoption & ROI

Intranet/Employee Assistant

Nathan routinely reaches out to Mia, the company’s intranet & employee assistant bot to check on internal company updates and to set up meetings.

Nathan: Hi Mia. Please schedule a meeting with Alex from the Sales team for tomorrow at noon.

Mia: Confirming, meeting tomorrow with Alex Knoxville at 12 PM?

Nathan: Confirm.

Mia: Meeting scheduled. Calendar invite sent to Alex.

Nathan: Any other updates?

Mia: Yes. The leave policy for the year 2019 has been updated. Tap to see the latest policy.

Nathan: Well, send it to my email instead.

Mia: Updated leave policy sent to your email.

Mia has made simple, daily tasks a breeze for Nathan.

Learn More: The Role of Chatbots in the Intranet

explore how chatbots can help

While these are only a few popular work-life scenarios in which chatbots can help Nathan, the fact is that several other ways bots can simplify work for him or any normal employee. The conversational interface of chatbots simplify everyday workflows for employees and eliminates the hassle of switching multiple apps. Chatbots act as a single point of contact to get tasks done and access information. The use cases of chatbots are diverse and emerging across functions and industries. Enterprise leaders should have a powerful bot strategy to make the most of this technology.

If you’re interested in learning more about chatbots and how they help your organization, feel free to get in touch with one of our chatbot consultants. Acuvate leverages its enterprise chatbot builder platform, BotCore to build, deploy, train and manage AI chatbots for large and medium sized enterprises.

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exploring the use cases of an enterprise chatbot

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How AI will Impact IT Service Management

Abhishek Shanbhag — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:03:00 +0000

How AI Will Impact IT Service Management

If anyone were to put together a list of technologies with the greatest potential, Artificial Intelligence (AI) would undoubtedly top it. AI is maximizing effective utilization of technology in the workplace and altering the business workflow to its best form.

In fact, ITSM organizations have started using AI to achieve a new level of control and accelerate productivity like never before. Integrating AI technology in IT service management (ITSM) will create a smarter ITSM experience and enhance the way humans get involved with the service management process.

AI can improve ITSM experience in different ways; a basic one being by using AI-driven chatbots to handle low value IT support calls. Chatbots also have the capability to integrate with many of the legacy ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Freshdesk or Jira.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 55% of all large enterprises will have deployed at least one bot or chatbot in production and AI augmentation will generate $2.9T in business value and recover 6.2B hours of worker productivity by 2021.

Enterprises are increasingly adopting chatbots for improving their business processes. Many B2B enterprises are looking forward to integrate chatbots on ITSM platforms, in order to eliminate traditional approaches and make the service process less complicated, less labor intensive and more cost-effective, all while also giving end users a higher level of customer service during every interaction with the IT service desk.

By implementing chatbots, organizations can witness tremendous benefits in the ITSM system:

Decrease in number of tickets raised and cost per ticket.
Fewer calls and shorter call durations.
Improved response times.
Enhanced employee productivity.
Reduced overall operational costs.

By 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions – Gartner

HERE ARE KEY AREAS IN WHICH AI TECHNOLOGY IS MAKING A POSITIVE IMPACT ON ITSM:

POINT OF ENTRY (INCIDENT/REQUEST CREATION)

IT Service Management systems are intended to help out employees at the workplace when affected with system issues. ITSM provides a self-service portal to raise requests and incidents whenever employees have trouble with their systems. Employees are required to fill out the online form to determine whether they are making a service request or an incident.

As per ITIL v3, incidents are split into two categories: service requests and incidents. An incident is an unplanned or unexpected interruption to an IT service which hampers employee work routine. For example, if an employee working on his regular activities encounters an unexpected interruption due to system malfunction or WiFi issue, he will then create an incident which will be attended to by an incident management team, to provide a quick fix.

Service requests are general requests originating from users requesting for something to be provided. For example, a service request can be raised to obtain access to the printer, upgrade to a higher version of a software or replace system components.

Unluckily, many service requests end up being incidents, and many incidents end up being service requests. As a result, service requests and incidents do not get resolved fast enough, subsequently affecting the employee experience.

However, IT service management organizations will continue to depend on human frontline analysts, until these types of challenges are resolved. This is because organizations fear that they might invest more time and money rectifying errors caused by miscommunication.

AI can make a difference here

Integrating AI technology helps to ensure information is accurately interpreted before it is entered into an IT Service Management system.

AI-powered chatbots will enable automated ITSM solutions with the capability to interpret incidents and requests accurately. As AI technology develops, we will see enhanced and personalized employee experience, in addition to improving the efficiency of the IT service management personnel.

Gartner claims that “Chatbots driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will play important roles in interactions with consumers, within the enterprise, and in business-to-business situations.”

AUTOMATED BACKEND PROCESSES

ITSM consists of backend processes that are designed to manage any request or issue entered into the system. Traditionally, these were entered by an analyst or an employee through a self-service portal.

Integrating AI technology in ITSM system can react to any issue based on updated patterns available in its knowledge base. AI-powered ITSM solutions can identify a ticket whether it is a service request or an incident and automatically open without human assistance.

Gartner states that “The next big shift is the convergence of technology products and services to create next-generation service offerings that will include AI platforms.

Further integration of ITSM with every system installed on the network will provide the ability to see much larger patterns, which makes it more efficient to solve issues and reduce human intervention in level 1 issues.

It can investigate the issue and cross-check the data with the IT security solution to find patterns that might explain the problem occurrence. ITSM solution identifies issues, provides insights and predictions about the problem and suggests steps to manage it.

As we move into the future, the AI-powered ITSM solution will be able to automatically correct level 1 issues without support staff involvement. However, human analysts will be engaged in more critical issues which will help increases overall employee efficiency and productivity.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

ITSM systems with AI technology will have access to an infinite universe of knowledge that can help improve service management and employee experience. Knowledge-based ITSM solutions with AI will change the way employees ask for help and receive accurate answers to almost any question and in no time.

Since AI technology, including Machine Learning (ML), enables solutions to learn, these solutions will be able to access unlimited amounts of data in trusted knowledge databases and learn patterns that exist within an organization, which help to solve problems more efficiently.

These solutions will also help to solve problems based on infinite amounts of data and document these findings in knowledge databases which can be used by both support employees and data analysts when needed.

They will not only look to knowledge databases to provide answers to IT questions but also be able to provide training, tips and tricks for employees in the form of manuals, images, videos, etc. by applying deep learning techniques.

They will provide more current and relevant documents, and eventually override those created by human analysts. However, until AI is perfected over the next few decades, the human input will be vital for ITSM knowledge systems.

SELF-SERVICE FOR LOW-TIER INCIDENTS

In ITSM, a large number of service requests often small issues that don’t take a lot of time to get resolved. These low-tier incidents are quite large in number and force service desk agent to spend time doing repetitive tasks, forcing critical issues to remain on hold. Due to this, employee efficiency gets underutilized, which in turn affects their productivity.

AI technology can help resolve this challenge. AI-driven chatbots can deal with low-tier incidents by proving self-service options. These issues can be addressed by chatbots, thereby saving a lot of time for agents and employees alike. Besides, support agents can work instead on critical issues and maximize efficiency.

Acuvate’s IT Helpdesk bot is an IT self-service request chatbot, built using the powerful bot builder platform, BotCore. It supports IT helpdesk as a virtual assistant, providing real-time alerts and high-speed responses. This bot has 24×7 availability and can easily integrate into existing self-service systems.

THE FUTURE OF ITSM:

ITSM trends demand businesses to evolve continuously. In the future, ITSM analysts will shift their focus to major incidents (one-to-many), problem management, and change management.

ITSM system provides self-service portals integrated with AI-powered chatbots which resolve the low-tier, low value and level 1 issues without human intervention.

80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020! – Business Insider

Over time, human involvement for any low tier issues will continue to decrease. And expecting IT analysts to more focused on future business objectives instead of IT objectives.

Leveraging these AI technologies within ITSM creates huge opportunities for businesses to deliver outstanding employee experience. These technologies will amplify human support in real-time to meet the high demands of customers and increase productivity.

By 2019, IT service desks utilizing machine learning enhanced technologies will free up to 30% of support capacity – Gartner

Nevertheless, service management will never lose the spotlight on as a result of automation. As long as IT exists, ITSM will still remain the top priority of an organization needs.

If you haven’t adopted this trend already, you might lose big game!

Looking for a Chatbot that integrates perfectly with your existing ITSM tool. Check our BotCore an enterprise-ready conversation bot platform which is integrable on both cloud and on-premise environments. BotCore allows you to deploy enterprise chatbots, train, and manage according to your needs.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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Why Your Employee IT Self-Service Needs Bots Instead of Portals

Jagan Jami — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:13:00 +0000

Why Your Employee IT Self-Service Needs Bots Instead Of Portals

Robotic virtual assistants on the enterprise side are known for their ability to expedite internal inquiries and save time for employees. Reports estimate $8 billion in annual savings from chatbots, with 80 percent of businesses considering implementing them. Chatbots allow your enterprise to scale seamlessly with speed and alleviates from the limitations of human resources . Early Technology adopters are replacing standalone web portals with interactive chatbots.

IT HELP DESK PORTALS VS CHATBOTS

Outsourcing IT help desk needs have already achieved a certain degree of cost-efficiency, but the internal workforce productivity has not gained much. IT help desk portals do not allow interaction with the user since they are task-based. They do not work on the behavioural schema of the employee. Due to these drawbacks, the most aspirational SLAs that are defined as key performance indicators (KPIs) for an organization are often missed.

With portals, teams face many practical challenges in fulfilling these SLAs. Employees and helpdesk agents need to switch multiple pages to complete the desired action as typically most of these portals have substandard navigation flows and UX. All this hassle results in the low adoption of portals and thereby the ROI gets affected.

Portals built on the cloud have resolved information accessibility and workflow issues, but still fail to motivate, remind and allow collaboration with other helpdesk team members in completing the tickets raised on the portal.

Chatbots on the other hand, encourage conversations, interactions, non-linear collaboration, consistency and non-bias. They are omni-channel solutions that be accessed through multiple devices — mobile phones, tablets, desktops, kiosks, etc. You may not this experience with a web portal solution.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A CHATBOT?

Technically, a chatbot is ‘a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, usually over a messaging app’. Some people also view a chatbot as service, as it is applied for virtual yet tangible outputs. Chatbots are AI powered that come with the ability to understand human language without human assistance. Enterprise chatbots are built using bot builder platforms which allow seamless deployment, training and management of bots. BotCore is a robust platform to create chatbots and some of the popular chatbots serve as IT Helpdesk agents. This platform is fully deployable on both on-premise and cloud (Microsoft Azure, AWS etc.) environments.

In some cases chatbots have empowered humans by adding time and allowing them to do the more productive work.

HOW CHATBOTS RESOLVE YOUR EMPLOYEE’S IT SELF SERVICE NEEDS?

Since chatbots are designed to understand complex human language interpretations, it increases the entire enterprise’s efficiency including that of the internal workforce. A Progress Software representative has mentioned that, “A bot could give the user the immediate interaction they need, and perhaps even complete the task, without forcing them through ticket systems that are often tedious for both the end user and the help desk,”

IT help desk chatbots are designed for self service. They not only offer the initial interaction that an employee is looking for, but also resolve the issue without compelling the employee to run into the maze of a ticketing system. Employees do not have to deal with the complex user flows, this is managed intelligently at the back-end by the chatbot.

Also, chatbots ensure consistent delivery quality by letting the human employee perform more intelligent tasks. It also saves a great deal for the Enterprise. According to the Human Resource Institute, it costs companies $10-$15k to replace one frontline employee. IBM has confirmed with research that chatbots can help reduce service costs by 30%.

CHABOTS FOR IT SELF-SERVICE EMPLOYEES.

At Acuvate, we have created a AI powered chatbot that uses machine learning and natural language processing to attend to simple IT queries. As an IT self service request chatbot, it works as an AI assistant and fulfils the need and presence of a Level-1 IT support assistant. Chatbots extract info from a knowledge base, FAQs and user guides and bring it to the actively used messaging app like Skype for Business, Slack, Skype etc.

The IT Helpdesk bot is equipped to handle real time alerts and manage incidents, security and outage. Chatbots reduce ticket costs and increase the productivity of IT helpdesk staff by arranging tickets based on priority.

IT Helpdesk bot’s features include high-speed response, 24×7 availability, elimination of calls, real time alerts, seamless integration into existing self service systems and enterprise level security. This can free up the time of IT personnel by accomplishing simple tasks like resetting passwords, troubleshooting and more. The conversational interface of chatbots allow users to get answers by asking one question at a time.

If the user is unable to find answer for his query, the bot automatically initiates the ticket issuance process.

The scope of work can be further programmed to meet the service requests within your organization. In the upcoming years, the adoption rate of chatbots is only going to grow and enterprises will transform into tech-enabled conversational units rather than silo structures dependent on redundant human resources.

If you’re considering to deploy chatbots for IT helpdesk, do check out our IT helpdesk bot which is currently used in several Fortune companies. If you need more information, check out our recent eBook on choosing the best bot-builder platfrom.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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Different ways your business can use chatbots

Jagan Jami — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 14:43:00 +0000

Different Ways Your Business Can Use Chatbots

‘80% of businesses want chatbots by 2020’ is projected by Oracle. While there are some are rule-based chatbots built for simpler tasks, the story is treading towards AI powered chatbots for intelligent and complex tasks.

Businesses have created personas that are ubiquitous and have multiplied presence. Chatbots come with the privilege of responding without bias and with a consistent behaviour. A Business Insider survey in 2017 has reported that ‘48% of consumers prefer a chatbot that solves issues over a chatbot that has personality.’ The saturation of the app market and increase in usage of messenger apps led to the rise of bots.

Businesses have discovered many different ways to use these programmed personalities to solve business problems. Their functionality can be divided based on type of audience and business segment.

CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO CONSUMER (B2C)

B2C Chatbot success stories over Facebook platform and Kik have gained popularity for their versatility. Here are a few ways you can use chatbots in a B2C scenario

Many customer service automation bots like Flow XO, IMI bot are growing in number. A survey by Oracle claims that, ‘65% of consumers prefer using a messaging app when contacting a business’. The demand is rising because these bots are able to personalize customer service for each business
Bots also help in initiating an expression of gratitude to customers. Kudos bot lets you say thank you and organizes delivery. .
Gamification stitched with an altruistic objective. Karma collector bot that collects your karma and encourages people to help others in a gamified way.
Financial markets are not left out of the radar of chatbots. There are bots that monitor stocks as well as track simple domestic savings. My Kai is one such bot that helps manage your savings.
Freelancers, especially content marketing and writing professionals bet big time of content writing bots. Grammar correction bot, Grammarly in one such solution.
Giphy is an interesting search bot that sieves the entire web to find the type of GIFs you are looking for.
There are bots that work on lifestyle and behavioural issues too. Wysa is one of the robo-healers among many out there that help people in dealing with depression, break-ups and laziness.
Woebot uses chat conversations, sentiment and tone analysis and word games to help people who are looking for inexpensive therapy.
There is also a bot that helps people stay mindful all through the day, which happens to be a proven health enhancement technique. It is called Meditate Bot.
X, Amy and a few hundreds of bots out there are programmed to be a personal assistant. They help in scheduling meetings, sending reminders and drafting emails, setting auto-responders all through the day. This eliminates the hassle of training and attrition.
Hello Era, Sephora and 1800 are some chatbots that are directed towards influencing purchase for their respective brands. They are designed to offer personalized information for those trying to make respective purchase decisions.

Some of these bots are also applicable to a B2B scenario. Chatbots for customer support and engagement are used by B2B businesses too.

CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO BUSINESS (B2B)

For B2B, chatbot solutions are fewer in comparison to B2C. However, it is not too far to see this number growing. Bots are supporting companies in majority of the functions starting from marketing, finance, workforce management and recruitment. A survey by Hubspot has revealed that 57% of consumers are interested in chatbots for their instantaneity.

Interview process management bot. Helps you to organize and manage interview person for a candidate. Gecko is an AI powered interview bot that uses video to help you screen candidates.
Meet Alex and Mya are few other AI powered bots that can help a recruiter with screening candidates and job interview scheduling. Some bots are also created to help you with interviewer feedback and job advertisements.
Marketing is now about being personalized and targeting to only those who matter to the business. Bixtext offers personalized marketing using artificial intelligence.
Tata Capital has achieved 600% increase in lead generation with the help of chatbot. There is another bot called Drift that helps in generating qualified leads using conversations.

CHATBOTS IN THE BUSINESS TO ENTERPRISE (B2E)

Organizations are more concerned now about being future-ready than ever before. Chatbots have proven their productivity is delivering high ROI in other spheres of business. To empower different elements of an Enterprise, organizations are building their own bots using bot builder platforms. To grow internally organizations face many behavioural and adoption challenges. Chatbots help in filling these gaps and improving productivity.

Gartner’s research points that almost 40% of intranets fail due to low adoption rates. Once deployed on organizational messaging apps like Skype for Business Skype Slack etc Chatbots extract info from intranet and present it to employees via QnA interface. At Acuvate, chatbots can resolve this situation for Sharepoint Intranet initiatives. We call this MeshBOT. It is agile and helps in mitigating intranet adoption. It empowers employees to optimally utilize intranet. As employees interact with MeshBOT it gathers information and patterns, which enables it to provide a personalised experience.

Every company has ideal and aspirational SLAs for its IT team. However, either due to under resourced teams, lack of time or decision making bottlenecks, the IT helpdesk team fails to fulfil the criteria. The self-service IT helpdesk bot not only empowers the IT team, but with fast response, it also helps the entire organization by rendering information in time. Bots for IT helpdesk increase support staff and employee productivity. They answer simple and basic questions of employees such as password reset etc. and thereby reduce ticket costs.

There is a high demand for business intelligence bots. Bots eliminate the need for users to visit multiple BI systems and can boost BI user adoption. Our Sales Intelligent Assistant (SIA), an AI powered chatbot integrates with Data Warehouse/ Line of Business systems or your CRM and enables the sales teams to chat and quickly obtain relevant information regarding key metrics.

Company financial performance monitoring bot. This is an internal tool that could be run by the CFO and her team.
Chatbots are changing the face of how HR is conducted. They help in automating several HR tasks like onboarding employees. This onboarding bot helps a person to find the right things, complete tasks in the best order etc. Donut is an onboarding and pairing bot that helps a new employee complete all the necessary tasks in the designated time. Such bots also track with the progress of an employee’s essential tasks.

Strategically implemented bots offer a lot of use cases for enterprises. At Acuvate, we conduct workshops for enterprise business and IT leaders to recognize use cases with the organization. Our free e-book helps you discover how to develop resources, get started with a chatbot program and how to choose an enterprise bot builder platform . If you are eager to build your own chatbot, get started at www.botcore.ai.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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How Can AI Bots Increase IT Helpdesk Support Efficiency?

Jagan Jami — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:36:00 +0000

How Can AI Bots Increase IT Helpdesk Support Efficiency?

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises are constantly facing challenges to balance the act of minimizing costs and driving efficiencies.

In the enterprise, IT helpdesk has become an indispensable part of business operations. It is playing a critical role in supporting business users with uninterrupted technology services.

Without IT helpdesk, employees would keep running into level 1 general issues that could affect their productivity.

However IT helpdesk efficiency is affected by a plethora of factors. These include:

Having to attend to low-value tickets.
Ongoing resolution of basic issues.
Employees approaching IT support team for trivial issues such as password reset and subsequently having to wait long hours till the issue gets resolved.

Changing workplace dynamics are bringing in a growing range of variable affecting IT helpdesk support.

UNDERSTANDING CHATBOTS

Basically, chatbots are simple AI programs that interact with users through the conversational interface. The main concepts that are driving the development of chatbots are artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Chatbots are revolutionizing the way B2E, B2B, B2C and C2C interactions work. They are designed in such a way that they get better and better by understanding the user based on the inputs the user provides, thereby saving a lot of money and time for organizations.

“By 2020, at least 80% of new enterprise application releases will make reasonably strong use of chatbots for conversational, AI-rich applications” – Gartner.

Chatbots also have the capability to extract data from user/FAQ guides which help employees resolve issues without having to refer to a guidebook. Employees can get answers to their questions using regular messaging channels like Skype, Skype for business etc.

BENEFITS OF IT HELPDESK WITH CHATBOTS

Using AI in IT helpdesk will enhance human support in real-time to meet the demands of employees and increase productivity. Here are a few ways that chatbots can increase your IT helpdesk’s efficiency:

ACCORDING TO GARTNER, “BY 2019, IT SERVICE DESKS UTILIZING MACHINE LEARNING ENHANCED TECHNOLOGIES WILL FREE UP TO 30% OF SUPPORT CAPACITY.”

ASSISTING EMPLOYEES:

IT helpdesk support team helps in providing information regarding products and services of the organization, troubleshooting, answering FAQs and IT policies, whenever employee raises a request. Addressing these regular and repeated activities could affect their productivity and in turn affect the cost to the company.

Introducing chatbots in IT helpdesk brings in a perfect value add of productivity and cost efficiency.

Using chatbots in IT helpdesk, helps organizations to address level 1 issues(regular and repeated) activities, manage tickets and provide self-service options. This helps in increasing the overall staff efficiency and ensures best support capabilities.

It addresses level 1 IT support issues by a quick chat using conversational UI. Chatbot provides options like quick troubleshooting, spread awareness about IT policies & initiatives, FAQ’s etc., using which employees can solve their general issues easily.

24/7 AVAILABILITY:

Extending support after office hours is always a challenge in the enterprise environment. When an issue arises after office hours or during downtime, solving it gets tough. So, these issues are added to queue till the support staff gets time to address them which leads to a slowdown in productivity.

Introducing chatbots in the IT helpdesk system helps in overcoming these problems and resolving issues effectively. They provide a unique range of options to solve the issues immediately. One doesn’t need to wait for the support staff for the resolution. Employees working late would always have a virtual support staff member addressing issues on time.

IT helpdesk chatbot also provides different troubleshooting scenarios which come handy even if the support staff isn’t available immediately.

24/7 availability of a virtual IT helpdesk support staff brings in a superior value-add to the existing IT helpdesk. Talk to us to know more.

INTEGRATE WITH LEGACY IT SYSTEMS (ITSM PLATFORMS):

According to HDI: “As a rule of thumb, if an end user spends more than 10 minutes in a self-service portal, they cost the organization more money than calling the service desk.

With AI technology such as smart machines making their way into enterprise world, AI is, like it or not, going to be a dominant solution in any ITSM system.

There simply aren’t enough resources for analysts to get personally involved with so many requests and tickets. For better or worse, human intervention for every request or one to one incident will not be sustainable. We will see numerous organizations use chatbots with AI abilities as a way to deal with.

Do employees need to call the IT helpdesk or fill the lengthy forms online to address their issues? Chatbots change these circumstances.

With the integration of chatbots, ITSM can be easier, faster, and convenient too.

An AI-powered chatbot is a key value for ITSM framework. It has the capability to integrate with many of the legacy ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Freshdesk or Jira. With these integrations, Chatbot will also have the capability to search in the respective ITSM tool knowledge bases to answer the end user questions.

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Looking for an IT helpdesk Chatbot that integrates perfectly with your existing ITSM tool. Click here.

MODERNIZING INCIDENT MANAGEMENT:

Some of the IT helpdesk staff are often found working on categorizing/ routing incidents. Addressing these incidents manually is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Indeed, even the most experienced IT support staff find it difficult to categorize a wide range of incidents raised at a given point of time. Due to this, most of the repeated issues stand in the queue and wait for its turn to get resolved.

Chatbot in IT helpdesk provide employees with quick links about troubleshooting technique using the conversation UI. If the issue raised is among the repetitive tasks a chatbot is trained to solve, employees will be provided with the resolving techniques. If not, chatbot pops up an option of registering the ticket in their legacy incident management system.

Chatbot helps the support staff in gathering the data from multiple systems to check the previous incident records of the employee for faster resolution and help an employee to keep track the status of the ticket.

Additionally, chatbot also helps the support team by generating a brief report on the number of tickets raised on a particular day. It gives detailed insights about tickets which are opened/ in the queue/ assigned. It also provides an option to search all open/high priority tickets for specific support agent and set up an alert for the support team.

SELF SERVICE:

For most of the issues, time is the main issue, even if it is a simple task like password reset. Employees tend to raise a complaint in IT helpdesk and wait for their turn to get access to their logins.

If the support staff is busy in fixing an issue, they may not be able to manage any incoming requests, even if it is a high priority. Due to this, employee work time gets underutilized, in turn affecting their productivity.

These issues can be better addressed by integrating chatbots into IT helpdesk applications. Chatbots create a self-service interface where an employee can instantly get access to the credentials within no time. During this process, employee validates their identity using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and get the issue resolved without any helpdesk support staff interference. Thereby, the employee can work uninterruptedly by resolving his issues without any dependency on IT team and make room for support staff to work efficiently on other high priority issues.

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Check out our IT Helpdesk Bot where employees can have the chat with a Bot available as a contact in messaging channels like Skype, Skype for business, Slack, Facebook Messenger etc. and reset the password using MFA.

LOW MTTR (MEAN TIME TO RESOLUTION):

Mean Time to resolution depicts the health of the IT helpdesk support in an organization.

Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) is the time between an incident being submitted and the time taken to resolve it. Tickets will be raised continuously and support staff may or maynot be available to address them in the expected time.

Service degradations and service interruptions can fundamentally affect both IT and business activities. IT support team should precisely measure incident response time to control service quality, outages and the cost to the company.

By integrating AI-powered chatbots in IT helpdesk, most of the repetitive tasks or issues will be addressed by the chatbot using self-service options/ troubleshooting techniques. This reduces the number of tickets waiting in the queue influencing the overall MTTR. Lower MTTR is the key factor in showcasing the efficiency of the IT helpdesk service.

The more the tickets received and the lesser the time it takes to resolve, there is an upsurge in the business productivity and eventually its bottom-line.

REDUCED COST PER TICKET:

For every organization, cost, or precisely unit cost, is basically important. Cost per ticket is a measure of how effectively an IT helpdesk service conducts work and leads its business.

“A RECENT HDI STUDY FOUND THAT THE AVERAGE COST PER SERVICE DESK TICKET, IN NORTH AMERICA (NA) IS $15.56. COST PER TICKET INCREASES SIGNIFICANTLY EACH TIME THE INCIDENT IS ESCALATED.”

Moreover, there are likewise indirect expenses for IT support directors/chiefs, equipment, facilities and training etc., that must be figured into the cost per ticket metric.

If chatbots are introduced in IT helpdesk, general issues get resolved and reduce the number of tickets which in turn lower the MTTR. The faster the MTTR, the lower its cost per ticket.

Minor/general issues will be resolved by chatbots using troubleshooting techniques and self-service options which help support personals not to keep running into general issues. They get engaged in resolving major issues which help them increase their productivity and cut the cost per ticket by working only on issues which are not addressed by chatbots.

TICKET ACTIVITY PERFORMANCE REPORTS:

IT helpdesk receive issues from different departments of the organization. If an employee raises an issue in the IT help desk application, the support staff or personnel will address the issue and continue to resolve other issues which are in the queue.

IT helpdesk cannot make a concise view where a similar kind of issues are occurring repeatedly. Resolving these frequent issues daily decrease the efficiency of the support staff.

Introducing chatbots in IT helpdesk helps in generating performance reports on the number of tickets raised, the number of tickets resolved, generate time-sheet and provide a report on frequent occurring issues.

By this report, the IT helpdesk personnel or organization can invest in the resource to reduce frequently occurring issues and helps in increasing work efficiency of the staff and increase productivity to the company.

MONITOR YOUR AGENT’S PERFORMANCE:

Monitoring IT infrastructures often involves tedious tasks multiple interactions and gathering reports from different legacy systems. This allows managers to identify problems, maintain quality standards and improve the overall experience.

Introducing chatbot in such a scenario paves a way to get the reports by simply having a quick chat with the chatbot. Chatbot can be integrated with AD/user profile servers/performance review system to track the overall progress of the employees and scale the productivity.

It can generate reports of the individual performance on daily/weekly/monthly basis and keep updating the status to the management team.

HUMAN HAND-OFF:

An AI-powered chatbot operates turn-by-turn discussion with the employee. Chatbots recognize keywords provided by an employee in the chat conversation and respond by matching queries with pre-set messages in its knowledge base and assist employees quickly.

Chatbots, unlike humans, don’t always guess correctly, and invalid responses will frustrate the user. So, to avoid all these users are provided with clear and smooth transition to human agents.

If the chatbot is not trained to answer a specific question, user will have an option to interact with human agents and address their issue.

Indeed, even after an operator is locked in, the bot remains as a background facilitator of the discussion.

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Overcome IT hurdles and provide consistent self-service answers with our IT helpdesk bot.

CONCLUSION

Chatbots have started to emerge into business consciousness and indeed acting as a major business productivity tool.

Gartner predicts that by 2019, 40% of enterprises will be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes using natural-language interactions.

AI-powered chatbots can unplug IT bottlenecks and resolve the most repetitive questions effortlessly. Support staff can stay focused on the high priority tasks than time-consuming and mundane tasks.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our experts for a personalized consultation.

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IT helpdesk bot is built using our industry renowned bot builder platform BotCore.

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